Yana and John Glass of Chino HIlls, California, said they lost the ring shortly after becoming engaged last year.
California couple John and Yana Glass were only engaged for a month when Yana’s 5-year-old son flushed the diamond engagement ring down the toilet but thanks to local sanitation workers, the happy couple were reunited with the ring more than a year after it became lost.
“It’s literally one in a million that you are going to find a ring,” Chino Hills maintenance worker Chris Sambrano told Inside Edition.
John and Yana had been trying to retrieve the ring since March 2022, when the boy flushed it down the toilet.
“I definitely think it was an accident,” Yana told Inside Edition. “I think he wanted to look at it, dropped it, and couldn’t think of anything else but hide it and hide his crime.”
Once they realized what had happened, they tried everything to get it back. John removed the toilet and used a drain camera to see if they could locate it, and to their surprise, they spotted it deep in the pipes.
“Lo and behold, there it is, just chilling in the pipes,” John said. “So now the challenge is getting it out.”
But the ring had traveled so far under the house there was no way of retrieving it.
John contacted the city, requesting for them to flush the lines to dislodge the ring, but that seemed to fail too.
But 14 months later, a city crew doing routine sewer maintenance had surprising news.
Sambrano and his colleague Tony Ochoa spotted the ring, and used a sieve-like device to catch it.
“You open the manhole cover, and there is about a 4-inch line that goes in there,” Sambrano said. “We dropped this in here like this, to see if we could see the ring. We ran the water through and we tried to push it inside.”
Yana, ever grateful for having the ring returned to her, vowed not to leave her son alone with the ring again.
